Seed treatment compositions for agricultural crops are known. Many such treatments, however, are based upon compositions that have certain undesirable attributes, and in modern day farming might be termed as environmentally unsatisfactory. For example, treatment compositions that contribute to runoff causing environmental problems such as eutrophication of groundwater, nitrate pollution, phosphate pollution and the like are unsatisfactory. With the ever-increasing public concern for the environmental impact of materials placed in the soil, or at the point of treatment, there is an ever-increasing need for development of effective seed treatments which are environmentally satisfactory, which cause no harm to the plant, and which are effective for a broad spectrum of agricultural plants. This invention relates to such a seed treatment for decreasing germination time, increasing the rate of germination and increasing the percentage of seedling that develop.
This invention therefore has, as its primary objective, the fulfillment of the above needs, in particular, development of non-toxic and environmentally satisfactory seed treatment for crops such as corn, wheat, soybeans and other crops propagated from seed, that increases the rate of seed germination percent emergence as well as survivability of seedlings that emerge as plants.
An additional objective of the present invention is to provide a composition accomplishing each of the above enumerated objectives and/or advantages which contains a polyamino acid which is of a molecular weight sufficiently large that it will not be taken up by the seed or the emerging seedling, and at the same time will not cause environmental pollution during runoff.
Another objective of the present invention is to provide an environmentally acceptable non-toxic seed treatment which can be combined with other seed treatments or coatings such as insecticides and seed and seedling disease treatments and seed nutrients.
An even further objective of the present invention is to provide a composition which can be, at the user's option, used as a liquid seed treatment composition or in a dry composition for seed dusting.
Yet another objective of the present invention is to provide a seed treatment composition which can be used with monocotyledons such as corn and dicotyledons such as soybeans.
The method of accomplishing each of the above objectives of the invention as well as others will become apparent from the detailed description which follows hereinafter.